Equally as interesting as the investment are the investors: T. Rowe Price led the investment round, with support from Google Ventures and a firm that's affiliated with Michael Dell. That contradicts reports from earlier today that the company would be announced up to $200 million in funding led by Intel.

The Google Ventures investment is particularly interesting because Google has its own Hadoop as a Service named BigQuery. "We see broad demand from enterprises who want a flexible approach to handling large amounts of data, and we expect this market to continue to grow rapidly," said Google Ventures General Partner Karim Faris in a press release distributed by Cloudera. "Cloudera is dramatically lowering the cost of reliable storage for the enterprise and is enabling the analysis and mining of large data sets in a way that wasn't possible before."

Cloudera emerged from stealth in 2009 and is now one of the leading providers of a product based on the open source Apache Hadoop project. Other major competitors include Hortonworks, Teradata, MapR Technologies, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services.

Senior Editor Brandon Butler covers the cloud computing industry for Network World by focusing on the advancements of major players in the industry, tracking end user deployments and keeping tabs on the hottest new startups.